The traditional business model for journalism is in disarray! This is what briggs is talking about in chapter 11, “Building a Digital Audience for News.” How can marketing and analytics save journalism? but better yet can it be the only thing that saves journalism? Well of course it’s not the only thing that can save journalism but as it turns out it can help. According to Briggs, journalism needs to find new benefits from new marketing strategies and measurement tactics. What I do agree with is that in order to to build you audience, you need to analyze what you publish, what your readers like and don’t like, and then do more of what they do like!

Measuring Journalism

As journalism takes on new forms of content like, blogs, video, breaking news updates–to new platforms like e-mail, mobile, Twitter new structures have been put in place. Newsrooms now track and measure everything they do! Tom Chester the news operations manager at the News Sentinel, begins each weekday with a stand up meeting in the newsroom that contains a detailed report of content published and traffic generated the previous day. Why you might ask? Well they want and need everyone to learn a new skill and publish more frequently to more platforms.

Track All That You Publish

Of course journalists everywhere should track all that they publish but of course with constant updates it gets hard to track every single update so Brigg gives us a starter list of content that journalist and newsrooms could be tracking regularly:

Total news stories per day

News stories by topic or section (sports, business, local and so on)

Total blogs posts per day

Blog posts by specific blog

slide shows per week

Video stories per week

Podcasts or other audio stories

News updates and so forth…

The easiest way to all this is with a web-based spreadsheet that all can access.

How to Set Benchmarks

So obviously if the newsrooms are compiling data without setting goals then it’s rather pointless, so set goals so that you can create benchmarks from the content you track and track your production. At Google they call this process OKR, which stands for objectives and key results.

Track your audience

After you know what you’re publishing then you’ll want to know what your audience is consuming. How can you accomplish this, well by using web analytics software. Where can you find one? Google has a free option that tracks your websites performance.

The blog goes on to discuss how you can optimize your search engine and discussed key terminology like spiderandrobots that refer to small computer programs and indexing that means larger more powerful programs on the search engines and queries that refers to the actual word used to search in the Google, Bing databases.